THE SILENCE
For his autofictional play »The Silence«, the playwright and theatre director Falk Richter delves into his own family history. His father died before he and his son, the author, had a reconciliatory conversation. In a dialogue with his mother, Richter focuses on truths that have remained unspoken for decades alongside suppressed secrets and unresolved traumas that continue to haunt him to this day.
How did the horrors experienced by his father during the war and the trauma of his mother’s expulsion and flight from West Prussia inscribe themselves into his family history and his parents’ marriage? What has been kept secret in the family for years? How did the playwright and his sister grow up in the provinces of post-war West Germany, how did the family develop? How was Richter’s gay identity, already emerging in his teenage years, suppressed and attacked by his parents? How did everyone react to the homophobic hostility he experienced? How do trauma, silence and violent oppression continue to have an impact on the playwright’s own relationships today?
This confrontation between mother and son becomes a journey into the chasms of West German bourgeois society from the post -war period to the present. But how reliable is Richter’s own memory? How credible the narrative of his mother? And could it all possibly have been completely different? Soon, the autobiographical mixes with the fictional, memories contradict one another and the possibilities of other realities emerge. But in playing with autobiography and fiction, and in the contradictions of his own history, an opportunity for hope presents itself: What alternative models of masculinity, and thus other types of fatherhood and parenthood, are possible? What kind of relationships exist beyond patriarchal oppression and violence? What form could a completely different life take?
IN MY ROOM
Is the contemporary crisis a crisis of masculinity? The time is ripe for new ideas. But even though everything is shifting, a conservative social rollback is emerging. Men appear to be stuck in old patterns, prisoners in the system of male dominance. What does it mean to be a man in the year 2020?
Falk Richter’s In My Room is a research project that unfolds a multilayered web of memories, images and voices from the personal space of a son and author, weaving biographical experiences with social narratives into a panorama of a present become past. It’s made up of snapshots of sons remembering their fathers, family rituals, everyday stories and societal developments.
In My Room is a personal autofiction experiment that dives into the unexplored black boxes that fathers leave behind. At the same time, it’s also, an imaginary echo chamber in search of traces of one’s father in one’s own life.